Sunday Sketchblog #25

A bit of the view from my window. I'm not sure if it's legible, but the words around the edge are what I could hear whilst I was drawing. It's quite bizarre how much there is actually going on when you think you're surrounded by silence!

Visit Emma to see what she's put on her blank pages this week.

Week Word: Inspiration

I chose this week's word, inspiration. But I'm not going to talk about sport. (I wonder if anyone will, or if we'll all try to come up with something different!)

Two things that have recently inspired me sprang to mind. The first is this quote from a letter Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother:

'I cannot tell you how happy I am to have taken up drawing again. I've been thinking of it, but I always considered the thing impossible and beyond my reach.'

Isn't that amazing? Van Gogh felt like drawing was beyond his reach but decided to ignore that feeling and get on with it anyway.

And the second is Shakespeare. I saw Timon of Athens at the National on Wednesday, a brilliant production and very appropriately set in modern-day London. Shakespeare's ability to have written words that still seem relevant and insightful so many years later always inspires me... not to write, necessarily, but just with the knowledge that although material things change around us people seem to stay fundamentally the same. I find that strangely reassuring.

Please do go and visit the other participants this week:

Emma at The Gift Shed
Rebecca at Purple Sparkle Days (a new Week Worder with a beautiful and already inspiring blog)
John at The Healing Seed (good to have you back, John!)
Margot at Tulsi Crafts (sorry to have forgotten you Margot)

I'm going to tag John to pick next week, to hopefully keep him with us for a while!

New regimes

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that I've had a little bit of a redesign. 

When I started blogging I thought I'd mostly be writing about books and interesting cultural things I'd done. I do mention those things occasionally... but it is quite clear that drawing has overtaken them as what I mostly like to do and what I mostly like to post about. It's always nice when you arrive on a new webpage to be able to see fairly quickly what it's supposed to be about, and hopefully that's a bit easier for anyone who stumbles across my corner of the internet now.

If anyone wants to let me know what they think, or make suggestions for other things I should change, that would be lovely! 

In the spirit of new regimes, I've also jumped on another bandwagon. I've read in a few places recently that apple cider vinegar does marvellous things to your skin and is generally good for your insides so, as it's cheap, I've acquired a bottle and had a tablespoon in a glass of water this afternoon. It, of course, tastes like diluted vinegar but I thought it was actually quite nice... If I remember, I shall report back on whether it seems to do me any good.

This Week's Word

Peggy tagged me to pick this week's word. 


I'm going to go for 'inspiration'. It seems appropriate with all the sporting achievements going on around us at the moment, but if running and jumping leave you cold then feel free to tell us what inspires you in any other part of life!


Pop a comment on this post if you'd like to join in and I'll do a round up on Friday.

An 'inspiring' chocolate cake... (because all blog
posts must have a picture!)

Sunday Sketchblog #24

I've been reading Danny Gregory's The Creative License recently, and trying to incorporate some of his tips and ideas into my sketches.

For this sketch, I started by drawing the outline of the whole thing first, then filling in the 'middle' afterwards. I would never have thought of approaching a drawing like that, but it turned out to be a really good way of tackling something complicated and made it seem much less daunting!

Visit Emma to see if she has a sketch for us this week?

Week Word: Water

Peggy chose this week's word, water, so visit her blog to see who else is playing, and what they've come up with.


This was quite serendipitous for me as I'd been wanting to create a drawing of Putsborough beach in Devon, where Nick's family have been every year since the dawn of time (and probably will continue going until its end).


It turns out, though, that drawing the sea was more of a challenge than I'd anticipated. Resulting in the following rather down-hearted scribble in my sketchbook...

I think I got there in the end, though, once I realised a dry watercolour brush gives a stipply effect like the foam on the water.

Crazy Cake Golf

Regular readers may have noticed that I'm quite a fan of cake. Nick likes golf (a bit... he doesn't own any of those unusual trousers or anything). So when I heard that Bompas and Parr were putting a cake-themed crazy golf course onto the roof of Selfridges this summer, it seemed the ideal Sunday afternoon activity.


All the obstacles are London landmarks made to look like cake. They're not actually icing and sponge, that would be a recipe for melty disaster in the British summer, but they look pretty realistic. And you get a Bakewell tart scented score card to add to the ambiance.

There are ten holes, and they ticket it so there aren't queues or too much waiting around. 

Tickets are released in monthly batches,  so you can still go along if cakey golf's your thing.